SCIENCE AND REVOLUTION 



Grecian philosophy and Roman conditions. But 

 neither Koeppen nor Bauer were able to exert 

 a pregnant influence on the political conditions of 

 their country by means of practical conclusions 

 drawn from their studies. 



Marx, on the other hand, probed deeper than 

 his two companions and became an epoch-making 

 historical" figure. He first of all set out on a 

 searching analysis of the three significant Gre- 

 cian schools of thought and studied their connec- 

 tion with the entire Grecian philosophy. He 

 graduated at the University of Berlin with a dis- 

 sertation on the difference between the philosophy 

 of Demokritos and Epicurus. And he came to 

 the conclusion that his purpose could not consist 

 in anything else but in stating religious and polit- 

 ical questions in their self-conscious human form. 

 Religion was the all-absorbing topic in those days 

 of political oppression, and a critique of religion 

 an indirect way of combatting all political re- 

 action. Marx was intimately familiar with the 

 works of Kant and Hegel, and went into a mi- 

 nute study of their proofs for the existence of a 

 God. The comical contradictions in those proofs 

 wrung from him the amused exclamation: 

 " What sort of clients are those, whom their own 



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